


last night I dreamed you dead

by all_these_ghosts



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Child Abuse, Gen, teen!Mulder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 01:24:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17070815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/all_these_ghosts/pseuds/all_these_ghosts
Summary: Last week Fox had asked about Samantha again.





	last night I dreamed you dead

**Author's Note:**

> yeah I know that the Mulders would have already been divorced by now, but let's be real this show had its main character be pregnant for 13 months and then get pregnant again at like 54 soooo I'm just not gonna worry about the timeline.

His father had been sick for days. Feverish, sweating. Last night Fox could swear he'd woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of his father screaming, and it was the worst thing he had ever heard. That his father — a man capable of causing so much pain — might be in pain himself? It couldn't be borne.

Tonight his mother was out. One of her ladies' groups, he figured. He didn't know what she did there, what she talked about. If he were honest with himself, he never gave much thought to her at all. Never questioned why she'd made the choices she'd made, never wondered what was going through her head. He only read her on the surface, and if he sometimes wondered why he was so incurious — when he was so curious all the time about everyone else — he didn't let the thought linger.

The door to his parents' bedroom was propped open just enough that he could see his father beyond it. His father had kicked off most of the bedding, with just a corner of the top sheet still twisted around his ankles. Even as Fox stood there he thrashed and moaned like a beast in captivity.

Last week Fox had asked about Samantha again. It had been her birthday.

Fox didn't have a lot of friends at school, but he knew another kid with a dead sister. Jake’s sister had died in a car accident when she was eleven. Her name was Olivia. They’d talked about it a few times. He knew that Jake’s family talked about her and hung her pictures in the house. And that they celebrated her birthday.

No one said Samantha's name. Not ever. If Fox had spewed all of the worst curse words he knew, all in a row at the top of his lungs, it wouldn't be as bad as mentioning his lost little sister.

Last week Fox had asked about Samantha again, and his father had backhanded him, the force and surprise of it sending him halfway across the room. At sixteen he was taller than his father; it had been years since he'd hit him.

And now his father lay in a pool of his own suffering. He'd barely been coherent the last time he woke up. Fox had asked yesterday if they shouldn't maybe get a doctor to come see him, but Teena had just stared at him and said, flatly, "No."

Maybe it was some weird disease. Maybe he got it from work. Maybe they were all going to catch it and die horribly and Teena was just trying to protect the rest of the world from a terrible outbreak—

There he went, getting carried away again.

He slid in sideways through the doorway and made his way barefoot to his father's side. His toes scrunching in the plush carpet. There was so little else in their house that was warm or comfortable.

In sleep his father looked smaller. His arms askew, his legs tangled, his skin white and glimmering with sweat. "Die," Fox whispered.

His father did not die.

When Fox was ten or eleven, before Samantha disappeared, his father had taken him out behind the house on Martha's Vineyard and handed him his gun. His father's large hands, chapped and scarred, wrapped around his small ones. _This is the safety_ , he'd said, _and this is the trigger_ , and when he pulled it — it was so much harder than Fox had always imagined, from the books he’d read and shows he’d watched — Fox had been thrown back into his father's chest, which was just about the only place that seemed even less safe than the other end of that gun.

His father kept the gun in his nightstand. This had always felt like a patently insane thing to do. That bringer of death, next to you while you slept.

Fox reached for it now.

The metal was smooth, especially in the places where his father's hands held it. The ink-black worn down to silver. It was both heavier and lighter than he remembered, though he knew that didn't make any sense.

He weighed it in each hand. The heft of it, and the imagined heat. _Boom_.

He'd spent his whole life promising himself that he would grow up to be a different kind of man than his father. This gun, this _thing_ , it was none of the inheritance he wanted. He was going to grow up to be a writer, a thinker. None of his father's violence.

His mind, a traitor, whispered, _Then how will you find her?_

He held it the way his father showed him, one hand over the other. _You don't point this at anything you don't intend to kill_ , he'd said, all those years ago in the backyard. Back then Fox hadn't been able to imagine intending to kill _anything_. It wasn't like he was overly sentimental, but it didn't seem like his place to decide what creatures on this earth got to live or die.

But he was changing all the time.

He pointed the gun at his father. He closed his eyes. _Boom_.

Bile rose in his throat. He would never. He could never. But accidents happened all the time, and it wasn't like his father kept his gun in a safe. Hell, he kept it _loaded_. No self-preservation instinct at all.

He held it the way his father showed him, and waited. Part of him wanted to see if his father would wake up. He wanted to see how that version of the story played out. There would be a fight. Someone would yell — maybe both of them — and maybe there would be a struggle, and maybe the gun just goes off. Accidents happen all the time.

His father didn’t wake up. 

Fox put the gun back in the drawer and closed it again, then padded down the hall and locked himself in his room. Much later he heard the door open — his mother — and the clink of glass in the kitchen.

When he dreamed he saw his father lying in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor, and he woke up with the taste of it on his tongue. In the morning he brought his father a cup of tea, and as he set it down on the nightstand their eyes met.

His father said, “Thank you, son,” even though he never thanked anyone for anything, and Fox thought _I’ve seen you die_ , and shut the door behind him.


End file.
